SeMv-3D: Towards Semantic and Mutil-view Consistency simultaneously for General Text-to-3D Generation with Triplane Priors

Recent advancements in generic 3D content generation from text prompts have been remarkable by fine-tuning text-to-image diffusion (T2I) models or employing these T2I models as priors to learn a general text-to-3D model. While fine-tuning-based methods ensure great alignment between text and generated views, i.e., semantic consistency, their ability to achieve multi-view consistency is hampered by the absence of 3D constraints, even in limited view. In contrast, prior-based methods focus on regressing 3D shapes with any view that maintains uniformity and coherence across views, i.e., multi-view consistency, but such approaches inevitably compromise visual-textual alignment, leading to a loss of semantic details in the generated objects. To achieve semantic and multi-view consistency simultaneously, we propose SeMv-3D, a novel framework for general text-to-3d generation. Specifically, we propose a Triplane Prior Learner (TPL) that learns triplane priors with 3D spatial features to maintain consistency among different views at the 3D level, e.g., geometry and texture. Moreover, we design a Semantic-aligned View Synthesizer (SVS) that preserves the alignment between 3D spatial features and textual semantics in latent space. In SVS, we devise a simple yet effective batch sampling and rendering strategy that can generate arbitrary views in a single feed-forward inference. Extensive experiments present our SeMv-3D's superiority over state-of-the-art performances with semantic and multi-view consistency in any view. Our code and more visual results are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SeMv-3D-6425.

MMEvol: Empowering Multimodal Large Language Models with Evol-Instruct

The development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has seen significant advancements. However, the quantity and quality of multimodal instruction data have emerged as significant bottlenecks in their progress. Manually creating multimodal instruction data is both time-consuming and inefficient, posing challenges in producing instructions of high complexity. Moreover, distilling instruction data from black-box commercial models (e.g., GPT-4o, GPT-4V) often results in simplistic instruction data, which constrains performance to that of these models. The challenge of curating diverse and complex instruction data remains substantial. We propose MMEvol, a novel multimodal instruction data evolution framework that combines fine-grained perception evolution, cognitive reasoning evolution, and interaction evolution. This iterative approach breaks through data quality bottlenecks to generate a complex and diverse image-text instruction dataset, thereby empowering MLLMs with enhanced capabilities. Beginning with an initial set of instructions, SEED-163K, we utilize MMEvol to systematically broadens the diversity of instruction types, integrates reasoning steps to enhance cognitive capabilities, and extracts detailed information from images to improve visual understanding and robustness. To comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of our data, we train LLaVA-NeXT using the evolved data and conduct experiments across 13 vision-language tasks. Compared to the baseline trained with seed data, our approach achieves an average accuracy improvement of 3.1 points and reaches state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on 9 of these tasks.

Text-Video Retrieval with Global-Local Semantic Consistent Learning

Adapting large-scale image-text pre-training models, e.g., CLIP, to the video domain represents the current state-of-the-art for text-video retrieval. The primary approaches involve transferring text-video pairs to a common embedding space and leveraging cross-modal interactions on specific entities for semantic alignment. Though effective, these paradigms entail prohibitive computational costs, leading to inefficient retrieval. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective method, Global-Local Semantic Consistent Learning (GLSCL), which capitalizes on latent shared semantics across modalities for text-video retrieval. Specifically, we introduce a parameter-free global interaction module to explore coarse-grained alignment. Then, we devise a shared local interaction module that employs several learnable queries to capture latent semantic concepts for learning fine-grained alignment. Furthermore, an Inter-Consistency Loss (ICL) is devised to accomplish the concept alignment between the visual query and corresponding textual query, and an Intra-Diversity Loss (IDL) is developed to repulse the distribution within visual (textual) queries to generate more discriminative concepts. Extensive experiments on five widely used benchmarks (i.e., MSR-VTT, MSVD, DiDeMo, LSMDC, and ActivityNet) substantiate the superior effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Remarkably, our method achieves comparable performance with SOTA as well as being nearly 220 times faster in terms of computational cost. Code is available at: https://github.com/zchoi/GLSCL.

Context-based Transfer and Efficient Iterative Learning for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation

Unbiased Scene Graph Generation (USGG) aims to address biased predictions in SGG. To that end, data transfer methods are designed to convert coarse-grained predicates into fine-grained ones, mitigating imbalanced distribution. However, them overlook contextual relevance between transferred labels and subject-object pairs, such as unsuitability of 'eating' for 'woman-table'. Furthermore, they typically involve a two-stage process with significant computational costs, starting with pre-training a model for data transfer, followed by training from scratch using transferred labels. Thus, we introduce a plug-and-play method named CITrans, which iteratively trains SGG models with progressively enhanced data. First, we introduce Context-Restricted Transfer (CRT), which imposes subject-object constraints within predicates' semantic space to achieve fine-grained data transfer. Subsequently, Efficient Iterative Learning (EIL) iteratively trains models and progressively generates enhanced labels which are consistent with model's learning state, thereby accelerating the training process. Finally, extensive experiments show that CITrans achieves state-of-the-art and results with high efficiency.

ProS: Prompting-to-simulate Generalized knowledge for Universal Cross-Domain Retrieval

The goal of Universal Cross-Domain Retrieval (UCDR) is to achieve robust performance in generalized test scenarios, wherein data may belong to strictly unknown domains and categories during training. Recently, pre-trained models with prompt tuning have shown strong generalization capabilities and attained noteworthy achievements in various downstream tasks, such as few-shot learning and video-text retrieval. However, applying them directly to UCDR may not sufficiently to handle both domain shift (i.e., adapting to unfamiliar domains) and semantic shift (i.e., transferring to unknown categories). To this end, we propose Prompting-to-Simulate (ProS), the first method to apply prompt tuning for UCDR. ProS employs a two-step process to simulate Content-aware Dynamic Prompts (CaDP) which can impact models to produce generalized features for UCDR. Concretely, in Prompt Units Learning stage, we introduce two Prompt Units to individually capture domain and semantic knowledge in a mask-and-align way. Then, in Context-aware Simulator Learning stage, we train a Content-aware Prompt Simulator under a simulated test scenarios to produce the corresponding CaDP. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance without bringing excessive parameters. Our method is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ProS

Generalized Unbiased Scene Graph Generation

Existing Unbiased Scene Graph Generation (USGG) methods only focus on addressing the predicate-level imbalance that high-frequency classes dominate predictions of rare ones, while overlooking the concept-level imbalance. Actually, even if predicates themselves are balanced, there is still a significant concept-imbalance within them due to the long-tailed distribution of contexts (i.e., subject-object combinations). This concept-level imbalance poses a more pervasive and challenging issue compared to the predicate-level imbalance since subject-object pairs are inherently complex in combinations. Hence, we introduce a novel research problem: Generalized Unbiased Scene Graph Generation (G-USGG), which takes into account both predicate-level and concept-level imbalance. To the end, we propose the Multi-Concept Learning (MCL) framework, which ensures a balanced learning process across rare/ uncommon/ common concepts. MCL first quantifies the concept-level imbalance across predicates in terms of different amounts of concepts, representing as multiple concept-prototypes within the same class. It then effectively learns concept-prototypes by applying the Concept Regularization (CR) technique. Furthermore, to achieve balanced learning over different concepts, we introduce the Balanced Prototypical Memory (BPM), which guides SGG models to generate balanced representations for concept-prototypes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the remarkable efficacy of our model-agnostic strategy in enhancing the performance of benchmark models on both VG-SGG and OI-SGG datasets, leading to new state-of-the-art achievements in two key aspects: predicate-level unbiased relation recognition and concept-level compositional generability.

Visual Commonsense-aware Representation Network for Video Captioning

Generating consecutive descriptions for videos, i.e., Video Captioning, requires taking full advantage of visual representation along with the generation process. Existing video captioning methods focus on making an exploration of spatial-temporal representations and their relationships to produce inferences. However, such methods only exploit the superficial association contained in the video itself without considering the intrinsic visual commonsense knowledge that existed in a video dataset, which may hinder their capabilities of knowledge cognitive to reason accurate descriptions. To address this problem, we propose a simple yet effective method, called Visual Commonsense-aware Representation Network (VCRN), for video captioning. Specifically, we construct a Video Dictionary, a plug-and-play component, obtained by clustering all video features from the total dataset into multiple clustered centers without additional annotation. Each center implicitly represents a visual commonsense concept in the video domain, which is utilized in our proposed Visual Concept Selection (VCS) to obtain a video-related concept feature. Next, a Conceptual Integration Generation (CIG) is proposed to enhance the caption generation. Extensive experiments on three publicly video captioning benchmarks: MSVD, MSR-VTT, and VATEX, demonstrate that our method reaches state-of-the-art performance, indicating the effectiveness of our method. In addition, our approach is integrated into the existing method of video question answering and improves this performance, further showing the generalization of our method. Source code has been released at https://github.com/zchoi/VCRN.

Progressive Tree-Structured Prototype Network for End-to-End Image Captioning

Studies of image captioning are shifting towards a trend of a fully end-to-end paradigm by leveraging powerful visual pre-trained models and transformer-based generation architecture for more flexible model training and faster inference speed. State-of-the-art approaches simply extract isolated concepts or attributes to assist description generation. However, such approaches do not consider the hierarchical semantic structure in the textual domain, which leads to an unpredictable mapping between visual representations and concept words. To this end, we propose a novel Progressive Tree-Structured prototype Network (dubbed PTSN), which is the first attempt to narrow down the scope of prediction words with appropriate semantics by modeling the hierarchical textual semantics. Specifically, we design a novel embedding method called tree-structured prototype, producing a set of hierarchical representative embeddings which capture the hierarchical semantic structure in textual space. To utilize such tree-structured prototypes into visual cognition, we also propose a progressive aggregation module to exploit semantic relationships within the image and prototypes. By applying our PTSN to the end-to-end captioning framework, extensive experiments conducted on MSCOCO dataset show that our method achieves a new state-of-the-art performance with 144.2% (single model) and 146.5% (ensemble of 4 models) CIDEr scores on `Karpathy' split and 141.4% (c5) and 143.9% (c40) CIDEr scores on the official online test server. Trained models and source code have been released at: https://github.com/NovaMind-Z/PTSN.

Dual-branch Hybrid Learning Network for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation

The current studies of Scene Graph Generation (SGG) focus on solving the long-tailed problem for generating unbiased scene graphs. However, most de-biasing methods overemphasize the tail predicates and underestimate head ones throughout training, thereby wrecking the representation ability of head predicate features. Furthermore, these impaired features from head predicates harm the learning of tail predicates. In fact, the inference of tail predicates heavily depends on the general patterns learned from head ones, e.g., "standing on" depends on "on". Thus, these de-biasing SGG methods can neither achieve excellent performance on tail predicates nor satisfying behaviors on head ones. To address this issue, we propose a Dual-branch Hybrid Learning network (DHL) to take care of both head predicates and tail ones for SGG, including a Coarse-grained Learning Branch (CLB) and a Fine-grained Learning Branch (FLB). Specifically, the CLB is responsible for learning expertise and robust features of head predicates, while the FLB is expected to predict informative tail predicates. Furthermore, DHL is equipped with a Branch Curriculum Schedule (BCS) to make the two branches work well together. Experiments show that our approach achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on VG and GQA datasets and makes a trade-off between the performance of tail predicates and head ones. Moreover, extensive experiments on two downstream tasks (i.e., Image Captioning and Sentence-to-Graph Retrieval) further verify the generalization and practicability of our method.

Adaptive Fine-Grained Predicates Learning for Scene Graph Generation

The performance of current Scene Graph Generation (SGG) models is severely hampered by hard-to-distinguish predicates, e.g., woman-on/standing on/walking on-beach. As general SGG models tend to predict head predicates and re-balancing strategies prefer tail categories, none of them can appropriately handle hard-to-distinguish predicates. To tackle this issue, inspired by fine-grained image classification, which focuses on differentiating hard-to-distinguish objects, we propose an Adaptive Fine-Grained Predicates Learning (FGPL-A) which aims at differentiating hard-to-distinguish predicates for SGG. First, we introduce an Adaptive Predicate Lattice (PL-A) to figure out hard-to-distinguish predicates, which adaptively explores predicate correlations in keeping with model's dynamic learning pace. Practically, PL-A is initialized from SGG dataset, and gets refined by exploring model's predictions of current mini-batch. Utilizing PL-A, we propose an Adaptive Category Discriminating Loss (CDL-A) and an Adaptive Entity Discriminating Loss (EDL-A), which progressively regularize model's discriminating process with fine-grained supervision concerning model's dynamic learning status, ensuring balanced and efficient learning process. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed model-agnostic strategy significantly boosts performance of benchmark models on VG-SGG and GQA-SGG datasets by up to 175% and 76% on Mean Recall@100, achieving new state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, experiments on Sentence-to-Graph Retrieval and Image Captioning tasks further demonstrate practicability of our method.